Let’s talk today about ReviewMe

When talking about being paid for your reviews you are going to be recommended ReviewMe and PayPerPost.
They may look similar but there is a huge difference probloggers fail to mention: ReviewMe accept you only when your Alexa rank is high!!!!
Alexa rank is a measure: how many visitors with Alexa toolbar installed, came to your website.
My question is: how many new bloggers ever heard about Alexa rank or Alexa toolbar? If somebody has the toolbar, probably has enough knowledge about pro blogging not to be a novice, and to continue the rationale, it must be a pretty technical guy. What in this world is the technical guy going to do on your humble blog? Nothing.
Hence, you are not going to have these type of visitors coming over, unless you chase their websites and try to convince them to come over, to buy some good Karma if nothing else.

In my opinion, as a newcomer blogger you stand almost no chance in getting the mandatory high rank. With a typical blog, 3-4 months old, you are going to be rejected because you have to have a minimum number of subscribers and traffic.
For Alexa it seems to be 500 unique traffic a day.

My first attempt with ReviewMe happened on September 23, 2007. At that time I had a fresh blog, with just a few entries.
I was reading suggestions about monetizing your writing, and because nobody takes the time to tell you not to bother trying ReviewMe until you build traffic, I filled out all the fields and the answer came back in a few seconds: Try again in a few months
I tried again today, December 31, 2007 and I got the same answer.
This time I was not disappointed because yesterday evening I finally did my homework and researched more thoroughly, therefore by the time I filled out again the application, I knew about the Alexa rank and I knew that I won’t qualify.

And following is Dosh Dosh’s opinion:
“Since moving to my own domain (from Blogspot) in the middle of January 2007, Dosh Dosh has moved from a rank of around 3 million to the current Alexa rank of 21, 709 within two months.

The growth has been consistent and I think most of it was due to the fact that the content on Dosh Dosh is orientated towards webmasters. Another plausible reason is because overall daily traffic for Dosh Dosh has been growing steadily day by day”

You must like this guy for his honest approach. I do.

Trying AdSense again

OK, I must admit that there is a part of me that absolutely hates rejection and failure. Although I try to have a more Buddhist approach to my life, I still find it difficult to just ignore the things that are bugging me. Probably I should make it a New Year resolution.

Although AdSense brought me such much grief, I decided before bad talking about it… more than I have already done it… to give it another try.
Start fresh, with a self-hosted website.

I still find upsetting the advice given to newcomers to try AdSense as the best way to make money.
Mathematically speaking it’s impossible to make money without traffic. And AdSense is all about traffic. Somehow, probloggers fail to mention that small detail. I would be more than happy to be proven wrong.

That being said, if my site would get accepted, which I have serious doubts it would be considering that it’s not on Blogspot, I am going to keep all of my readers accurately informed about how much money I made.
It’s time for somebody to be honest about it. I am just a regular baby boomer with a full time job.
Like lots of other people I have been deceived into believing that it’s not so complicated to make money on the net if you are capable of writing interesting articles.
Unfortunately it’s not that easy.
From my previous experience with AdSense I must admit that I have spent lots of hours writing.
I used to wake up at 5 in the morning and go to bed at midnight just to write articles. Some days I managed to have three entries, not bad for somebody who is not a stay-at-home mom.

There are two teams on the net: the pro and anti AdSense.
The pro team is going to bring eulogies to how wonderful AdSense is and how much money they make. How? Don’t hold your breath getting straight answers.
Even if you go to sites that allegedly tell you how to make money with AdSense, you are not going to find concrete examples. Just generalities, copied from various sources.
You are going to be told about the power words and your whole life will start revolving around finding the high paid words and how to include them as many times as possible into your articles.
The persons getting traffic will be the ones giving the advice.
Just think: If by some miracle you are going to find a niche, are you going to disclose it to the whole blogoshpere? I guess not.

The anti team… well, it’s normally made by guys who got burned by Google algorithm. But it’s always two sides of a coin, right? Their voice should be listened as well.

At this point I don’t have a clear action plan in mind. It’s premature to think of one until I get the answer from Google.
But if again I am going to get rejected I swear it’s going to be my last attempt and at that point I would conclude that AdSense is indeed an obsolete way of making money.